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Is the idea of a single language that's clearly better than anything else, for everything, a common one? If one thinks of languages as tools, it seems pretty o
by Anderkent 11y ago
Is the idea of a single language that's clearly better than anything else, for everything, a common one?
If one thinks of languages as tools, it seems pretty obvious that different languages will be the best tool for different kinds of tasks.
Are you writing a REST wrapper around an existing java toolset? Clojure's your friend.
A cryptographic, secure communication library? Rust is probably (going to be? in a couple months?) the way to go (unless you only care about the jvm).
Or maybe you're gluing a couple unix tools together in a fairly complicated fashion, in which case something like python is likely the right choice.
- cousin_it 11y agoWhat if it's a large project where you have to do all these things? Would you run ten different language runtimes, each with its own garbage collector? Would you pay the cost of marshaling and unmarshaling data at the boundaries? What about training new programmers to understand and extend your system? What if you want to move some functionality from one part of the system into another, can you do it easily? Etc, etc. There's a lot of value in adopting one general purpose language as a company-wide standard, like Java. It doesn't have to be an excellent fit for every task, but it has to be adequate and not have any major flaws. That's harder than it sounds. I like the Rust approach (memory safety without GC), though Rust itself might not be the best possible realization of that approach.
- iopq 11y agoThe great thing about Rust is that it doesn't need to be garbage collected, so it's easy to use inside a Ruby project. That's why you can use Rust in a lot more places than you would use Java.